How Small Businesses can Empower Their Teleworkers
When an employee, either on a permanent or frequent basis, works remotely from the same location , we call this location a virtual office and the employee a teleworker or telecommuter. For instance, if during peak season some employees have to work on week-end from home or if during a long medical recovery a person cannot drive to the office they effectively can be considered to be teleworkers. Obviously certain professions are more prone to teleworking than others with the best illustrations being telemarketers, central reservation call centers or order takers.
Note that there is a difference between a mobile worker (a worker whose working location changes and is not predictable) and a teleworker (a worker with multiple but predictable working environments).
Teleworking brings along multiple benefits for employees, business owners and customers:
• Greater flexibility – teleworking allows employees to better balance their professional and personal life; it allows customers to reach out to businesses at enhanced business hours; and it allows business owners to more cost-effectively adjust their capacity to market demand.
• Greater productivity – teleworking allows employees to protect the environment as well as save time and money avoiding the commute; it allows business owners to more easily provide longer business hours or ensure 24/7 service; and it protects employees from sick co-workers during flu season for example.
• Greater talent – teleworking allows business owners to hire the best people with the skills they are interested in regardless of where they live.
But in order to fully take advantage of the benefits associated with teleworking, you need to have a communications system that truly empowers employees to perform in the same manner as if she/he were in the office. Let’s look closer at these requirements.
The first thing a teleworker needs is an Internet connection back to the office where the communications system sits, in our case the Avaya IP Office.
Then you have to choose the end-point. A regular IP phone such as the 5600 Series can be used and will offer the same functionalities that are available at the office: same phone extension, same directory, same conference bridge, call transfer, speed dial or voicemail. International calls will even cost the same as if they were placed from the office.
Moreover, if the employee already has access to a computer as part of his/her work, the computer itself can be used as a phone either by installing a software on it (called a softphone) such as Phone Manager Pro or, for an even easier to deploy solution, via a web portal interface such as One-X portal for Avaya IP Office.
One-X portal can run on any Mac or PC and offers functionalities similar to the phones plus call queue management or history logs or click and drag options. It will be part of our upcoming release, R5, available early August. A more complete description can be found at The Telecom Blog, a blog written by Jeff Wiener, a telecom veteran who participated into R5 beta.
Phone Manager Pro actually emulates a phone on your computer and while offering the same feature it can also be configured in a few clicks to have multiple ring tones or integrate with business applications such as Outlook.
Depending on the features you need or the interface you prefer you can use one or the other of these three options. Another important point is to make all these communications as secured as if they were happening from the office. As such Avaya IP Office and its phone integrate with a VPN gateway to provide completely private communications.
Now you will ask me: “How can I predict what end point my employees will prefer (phone or computer) or if they would rather use a web portal phone or softphone?”. Well to facilitate your selection and give each employee the freedom on how to manage their communications away from the office, Avaya will also release teleworker packages in early August. These packages will include all the functionalities described above providing peace of mind to business owners by always meeting any teleworker needs and thus maximizing ROI. No need to understand all the technical aspects or make a bet on what the majority of the users will prefer portal or soft phone. Avaya’s new teleworker package will be priced on a per user basis to a pay-as-go model that better suits the SME space.
Posted by Isabelle Guis at 19:22 on July 29, 2009
Carl Knerr said..
Posted at 12:42 on August 06, 2009
I am a teleworker myself and work on a team that is almost completely teleworkers. With VPN access, my Avaya IP Phone with VPN firmware, Avaya Meeting Exchange, and the one-X Portal and Mobile applications, I can easily work from home without it making any difference to my work. Furthermore, when my wife and I had twins last year, we were able to move to my mother-in-laws and I could continue to work from there, even though it is hours from the nearest office location.
Avaya’s technologies are directly responsible for this great work opportunity.